Put it on a flashlight app so the people frantically trying to turn the light on in the dark click over and over and over and over ….

For those keeping tabs on the elusive formula for what makes a data scientist, add “sense of humor” to the list.

Claudia Perlich’s official title at New York City-based Dstillery is chief scientist. “I like to make data useful,” she said in an interview with CMSWire. With Dstillery, Perlich designs, develops, analyzes and optimizes the machine learning which turns millions of small, individual events — a website visit, the apps you use on a smartphone, the location of the smartphone — to narrow down prospective customers for brands to target with online ads.

And before you get worried about the creepy data collection factor, Dstillery ensures that all data it collects is anonymized — assigning each person it tracks a 20 digit random number. It does not store personal information and only retains IP addresses transiently. No profiles or classifications are created from the data. As Perlich put it that’s “the beauty of the machine making the decisions … to a computer a data point doesn’t mean anything, it’s just a data point.” She went on that Dstillery is “not interested in what you’re reading or what it’s about. It just needs to know that you went to that page.”